Mashroo3i Business Plan Competition Reveals Bahrain's Top Young Entrepreneurs

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For those curious about up and
coming startups in the Bahraini entrepreneurship community, new
business plan competition Mashroo3i, launched
by Tamkeen (Labour
Fund), revealed some of the country's top young
entrepreneurs this summer, as youth between 16 and 23 competed to
prove the value of their ideas between March and
July.

After submitting their ideas to enter the competition this
March, sixty teams were shortlisted and given one month to fully
develop their business plans under the guidance of mentors who
represented a cross-section of seasoned business executives.

Judges then evaluated the quality of the business plans and
selected 25 teams to continue to the final prototype phase, which
was designed to simulate the real life experience of operating a
business. Each team was allocated an exhibition space to set up
their business, design their window dressing display, decorate
their shop gallery, market their product or service; and of course,
generate sales, all over a three-day weekend from July
12th to 14th at the popular Bahrain City
Centre mall.

The final three teams were chosen jointly by judges and the
general public, over 7,000 of whom voted for their favorites
through the competition’s Facebook page.

Displaying all the tenacity and zeal characteristic of a budding
entrepreneur, Mashroo3i contestant Yousif AlSayegh reached out to
Wamda to tell us about his team’s enterprise, GoalShare.

GoalShare is a sports website that allows football fans to
forecast football results, gaining points and prizes in correlation
with their forecasting track record. Users can also share their
forecasts on social media site such as Twitter and Facebook.

Yousif and his team members, Ali Molani and Mohammed Al Awadhi,
came up with the idea to give youth a more interactive platform to
engage with sports. The team created a prototype for the
Brazil-Egypt football match that took place at the 2012 London
Olympics. The website is yet to be officially launched, but the
GoalShare team is currently working on a mobile app.

Although GoalShare was not a winner in Mashroo3i, Yousif’s team
managed to secure seed funding from a Qatari investor.

Speaking of his failures (current and previous) and
entrepreneurship lessons learned, Yousif’s resilience and
positivity are both refreshing in the context of an Arab culture
which struggles to embrace the F-word; and an indicator that
younger generations are taking a page from successful entrepreneurs
like Bill Gates and Fadi Ghandour, who didn’t necessarily get it
right the first time.

In the next phase, Tamkeen plans to identify the most lucrative
and market-ready Mashroo3i ideas and support them through its
existing programs to turn them into viable operational
enterprises.

Mashroo3i team presentations and other footage can be found on
the competition’s YouTube
channel.